More than ever, augmented reality technologies set themselves in the world of promotion, of marketing and professional applications. Fun and revolutionary, they offer brands a new mean to promote themselves, more in line with clients’ needs and expectations. Nevertheless, it appears that advertisers no longer wish to rely on original technologies but would rather commit to industrial and secure infrastructures.

Two processes of augmented reality are available to users. The first one uses black & white marker printed on the visual or the packaging of the product. The second method is able to directly recognise the visual printed on a product or a brochure and has the great advantage to be useable on any existing supports.

This more advanced system has already won votes amongst professionals. It is nonetheless, important to consider the various technological options currently available within this MLT technology (Marker Less Tracking) in order to design the key line of the new standards.

Plug-Ins

This is currently the most widespread approach on the market as best responding to clients’ expectations in terms of safety and interactivity and is therefore elected for its reliability. In fact, this is not the only reason for the success of the plug-in technology. The smoother and more professional 3D enhances the product through greater quality of visual, as well as the possibility to bring products to life and to create immersive applications. On the other hand, this technology necessitates the installation of a proprietary plug-in to fully use the application.

Flash technology

This process is mostly used as a mean to demonstrate rather than being part of a global business strategy. Despite its definite assets (the installation of a Flash plug-in is simple and reassuring for the user), three major stumbling blocks comes in the way: the sturdiness of the tracking, the 3D quality and the protection of the contents.

There no known professional Flash solution to-date providing an acceptable identification and tracking of the image without the use of markers. Current Flash Players 3D performances are limited and the only way to obtain a satisfactory quality is to work with a limited amount of polygons which considerably increase time and thus cost of production. Furthermore, Flash Player does not guaranty a real protection of the algorithms and associated content.

As explained above, beyond the qualitative aspects linked to 3D and to image tracking, mastering security aspects is an essential prerequisite to any massive internet deployment. Data pirating and manipulation of contents can prove to be disastrous for a promotional campaign. It is therefore important to realise that security is a real concern for advertisers and market suppliers are compelled to rely on technologies guaranteeing a total integrity of their contents.

To-date and as stated previously, only plug-in technologies are able to respond to such a genuine request.

With this awareness of the necessity to conciliate ease of usage and security, augmented reality professionals must provide a new standard to include all of these virtues. This is where we see the emergence of a new processing method – the Flash MLT, combining the advantages of both methods. Thought and developed with an industrial and professional approach, this innovation should quickly position itself as a reference standard in augmented reality. It represents a real technological revolution, it could rapidly lead to the widespread of augmented reality technologies on Internet and to the development of always more exciting projects.